Jan 18
With all the heat and humidity in the air on Mon, it got very foggy around suppertime on Tues, then rained most of the night . It cooled down about 20 degrees yesterday from the 80+ temperatures we had on Tues. We spent a quiet day - got some groceries; Lois got her hair cu; Roger & I played Triominoes.

After supper, Lois, Roger & I went to a concert at the University of Texas at Brownsville.

The concert was by an all-male South African a cappella singing group called Ladysmith Black Mambazo. From their website: "Assembled in the early 1960s, in Durban South Africa, by Joseph Shabalala (still currently leading the group) – then a young farmboy turned factory worker – Joseph took the name Ladysmith Black Mambazo – Ladysmith being the name of Shabalala’s rural hometown; Black being a reference to oxen, the strongest of all farm animals; and Mambazo being the Zulu word for axe, a symbol of the group’s ability to “chop down” any singing rival who might challenge them. Their collective voices were so tight and their harmonies so polished that they were eventually banned from competitions – although they were welcomed to participate strictly as entertainers .

In the mid-1980s, Paul Simon visited South Africa and incorporated Black Mambazo’s rich tenor/alto/bass harmonies into his Graceland album – a landmark 1986 recording that was considered seminal in introducing world music to mainstream audiences. "Graceland" one many awards including the Grammy Award for Best Album of the Year. A year later, Simon produced Black Mambazo’s first U.S. release, Shaka Zulu, which won the Grammy Award, in 1988, for Best Traditional Folk Album. Since then, and in total, the group has received fifteen Grammy Award Nominations and three Grammy Award wins, including one in 2009. Their most recent CD, "Songs From A Zulu Farm," has been nominated for a Grammy Award (to be announced in Feb, 2012) in the cateogory of Best World Music CD."